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I’m really excited to finally be able to announce an exciting project that we have been passionately working on since August last year (2011)! Design Sojourn was commissioned by Design Singapore, the national agency leading the initiative to establish Singapore as a global city for design in Asia, to develop a curriculum for an intensive 9-day design thinking workshop (starting from 6 February 2012) for their Design Thinking and Innovation Academy.

The Design Thinking & Innovation Academy (DTIA) was established in 2010, to infuse design thinking and develop design-driven innovation capabilities in the private and public sectors. This is achieved through a series of design thinking workshops that encourages the Healthcare, Retail & Services, Manufacturing and Food Manufacturing clusters to rethink their strategies, and what it takes to create an organization that uses design for sustainable business success.

Design Sojourn will be focusing our workshops on helping participants rethink the manufacturing industry, which spreads as far as precision medical products, to watches, to home ware or furniture, consumer electronics and to even industrial B2B products. As design is an all encompassing activity we will also cover the services and experience design of such products.

What is different in these workshops is that it is structured in a manner that allows participants to learn by doing. The workshops require participants to bring in real world problems for the design thinking treatment.

I have assembled a team of multidisciplinary facilitators that are all senior design professionals who worked for, or have worked for, brand names that you would have likely heard of before. So not only will you learn from the experts, you would be able to seek their expert opinion in an open learning and design environment no different from how successful brands work with and leverage on great designers.

Targeted to senior managers and leaders of organizations, I hope to give participants a strong appreciation for design thinking and what it takes for an organization to adopt Design as a strategic competitive advantage. Participants will learn to fish, so to speak, or at the very least learn what it takes to make design thinking happen.

Interested? I’m sure you are!

Unfortunately, as this is a fully subsidized initiative by the government of Singapore, it is only open to organizations that are based in Singapore. You can get more information from the official website, but here is a quick summary:

Level 1 Inspiration Workshop

This 1-day workshop will introduce the key principles of design thinking to participants and illustrate the benefits of the design thinking approach as a strategy for innovation. This 1-day workshop is targeted at C-level executives, decision makers, and participants managing innovation. The workshop is limited to 40 participants.

Level 2 Opportunity Workshop

This 4-day workshop, based on each selected team’s innovation project, will take the participants through the design thinking and design-driven innovation process from user empathy to low-res prototyping and testing with the users. This 4-day workshop is targeted at teams who manage or are involved in the industry’s innovation process. The outcome of the workshop will result in the creation of strong design brief(s), some initial concepts and a clear articulation of what kind of design interventions could deliver meaningful innovation and value. The workshop is limited to four teams from different organizations. Each team can only comprise 3-6 people from the same company and the entire workshop is capped at 25 participants.

Level 3 Implementation Workshop

This 3-day workshop, a continuation from the Level 2 Opportunity Workshop, will guide the participants to develop their selected opportunity areas further and determine how design innovation could be implemented, identify a number of specific interventions / concepts / solutions as pilot development projects. This 3-day workshop is only available to participants who have completed the Level 2 workshop.

There are very limited spaces left in all 3 workshop levels, so if you run/lead/own an organization that is based in Singapore, or know of someone that does, do let me know by sending me an email via our contact form or head on over to their website for more information.

[…] Our Facebook fans had a little treat last week, when they caught wind of Design Sojourn’s new look. Developed together with my friends from Black Design, this rebranding initiative was targeted to coincide with our first massive Workshop Project. […]

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